


Star Wars: The Force Reawakens

by ASMillen



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ben POV, F/M, Fluff, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force Teachings, Force Visions, Friendship, I Need Therapy After TROS, Love, M/M, Not sure about smut yet, Original Characters - Freeform, Rey POV, Reylo - Freeform, Sequel Trilogy Re-Vamp, Sequel Trilogy Reimagining, Slow Burn, Smuggler Ben Solo, That's Not How The Force Works, The Force, The Millennium Falcon - Freeform, Y'all Can Send Me Prompts, kind of enemies to friends to lovers, maybe smut, please
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2020-01-10
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:15:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22044697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ASMillen/pseuds/ASMillen
Summary: After years of peace, a new threat awakens in the Galaxy. With the First Order becoming prominent within the core worlds, conquering planet after planet, the Resistance rises to defeat it with the aid of General Leia Organa-Solo, but there's only so much they can do against the dreaded Core Ren, a Dark side practitioner who claims to have defeated Luke Skywalker herself when she destroyed his Jedi Praxeum.When the academy was destroyed, Ben Solo joined his father on the Millennium Falcon and took up the dangers of smuggling as a way to escape from the memories that haunted him. Having witnessed terrible destruction at the hands of the Force, he'd cut himself off entirely until a certain scavenger was tractor-beamed into his life.Rey has spent years scavenging on Jakku, waiting for parents who were never coming back. When the opportunity presented itself to go off-world with Finn, the supposed Resistance fighter who seemed shady at best, she took it gladly and stole a piece-of-junk ship from Unkar Plutt's shipyard, leading her right into the belly of the Resistance.
Relationships: Finn & Rey (Star Wars), Leia Organa/Han Solo, Poe Dameron/Finn, Rey/Ben Solo
Comments: 6
Kudos: 40





	1. Prologue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello everybody! I'll be super thrilled if anybody wants to read this because it's basically my broken-hearted mind rambling over things after watching TROS. I'm writing this simply because I can't get it out of my head and, if I don't write it, I might actually go insane. So, this is basically a sequel trilogy fix-it from the start, which will, hopefully, not end the same way as the movies.
> 
> We've got some OC's in here because I have a great idea for who would be Snoke's apprentice if Ben Solo weren't, and there's got to be some more of Luke Skywalker's surviving students, duh. This is probably going to be a mix of canon and legends stuff, just 'cause the legends pages of Wookieepedia are usually a lot more informational than the canon ones. Go figure, right?
> 
> Anyways, just enjoy the show.

_28 ABY_

When Ben Solo awoke that night, it was to smoke and ashes. A foreboding feeling washed over him like a cold, dark tidal wave, warning him that he would be pulled under its surface if he didn’t move. Without another thought, he rolled over the edge of his bed and grabbed his lightsaber as the ceiling of his hut gave way and crashed into the spot where he’d just been sleeping.

His heart thudded against his chest at a rapid pace almost like it would break through his ribcage and burst from his chest if it could’ve. Wary of the situation, he ignited his saber, feeling only a small amount of comfort in the warm, blue glow of the blade. Inhaling a long, deep breath, Ben started taking short, slow steps forward, carefully side-stepping his now ablaze bed, and headed for the door of his hut.

Screams echoed all around him, some young, some old, and all of them pierced his heart, making him feel as if he couldn’t breathe. His hand trembled where it was clenched around the handle of his saber, betraying his nerves as he shoved his door open and poked his head outside, seeing the destruction that lay before him.

It was—Terrible was the only word he could think of that could possibly come even remotely close to what his eyes could hardly reconcile as the Jedi Praxeum he’d studied at for the past several years. White-hot flames covered nearly every available surface, leaping from hut-to-hut, devouring everything they touched. People were running around in terror, students, instructors, younglings, screaming and crying and fighting back against the intruders. His mind supplied the word— _intruders_ —for it couldn’t have possibly been anything else, Ben was sure of it.

As Ben stepped out of the protection of his hut, ready to defend the weakest among them, the wind shifted and sent an awful, acrid smell tingling around his nostrils. He gagged and wrinkled his nose, but the smell stuck to him. The only way he could have possibly described it was to say it smelled like burnt bantha meat, but he knew that wasn’t entirely correct. There was something else, something he couldn’t quite place.

His eyes widened when he realized what, exactly, it was. A sound like a sob barrelled up his throat, choking him almost as much as the smell had, as his vision blurred with tears. His ugly, gnawing suspicion was confirmed when he walked to the hut closest to his and saw that the person inside it, a new kid he hadn’t had the chance to meet, hadn’t made it all the way out of the little wooden structure. The body was blackened to a crisp, the clothes nothing but ash.

 _It’s burnt human flesh,_ Ben’s mind supplied for him as he took one step back and another and another until he was back up against the outside wall of his own hut.

His mind spun around what he’d just seen, unable to completely wrap his head around the fact that he was witnessing the burning of the praxeum _and_ the students. Something else occurred to him as he stood there, cowed by his discovery. _I still haven’t seen Uncle Luke,_ Ben thought to himself almost absentmindedly as he realized that his uncle should’ve been the first person he saw.

Without a second thought for himself, Ben ran in the direction of his uncle’s hut. As he charged through the flames, carefully avoiding the students and teachers running about like crazed loons, he managed to elude the attackers, whoever they were, but he knew his luck wouldn’t last for very long. If he was right, he’d find them wherever his uncle was because there was absolutely no way Luke Skywalker wouldn’t have been protecting his students unless he couldn’t.

His footsteps thudded loudly against the steps as he rushed up the side of the mountaintop his uncle’s cabin resided on top of. He tried to stop his mind from whirring with a thousand thoughts and questions a second, but he couldn’t bring himself to peace, not yet, not after what he’d witnessed. It wasn’t possible for him to stop wondering what he’d find in that cabin.

Would he find Luke, whole, surrounded by a dozen corpses?

Would he witness the death of his uncle at the hand of these intruders?

At that point, Ben wasn’t sure which would be worse, but he knew he had to do what he could to stop either outcome from happening. He came to a slow, reluctant stop as he made it to the last couple steps and found himself staring, face-to-face, at the one thing he wouldn’t allow his mind to blurt out since he’d awoken to nothing but ruin and destruction.

 _Betrayal_.

“Vera,” Ben said in a low, unsteady tone as he looked upon the face of his classmate, the closest thing he had in the world to a friend, and saw a flash of yellow sparkling in her sea blue eyes. In her hands, the blade of her lightsaber flashed the bright green color it always had, but something felt different about it in the Force. “What are you doing?”

“Something I should have done a long, long time ago,” Vera replied in an airy voice that made it seem like she was simply talking about eating the last piece of Fringi spice cake, not destroying the Jedi Temple they’d both called home for years.

“Why?” Ben asked as his unshed tears finally slid down his cheeks, mixing with the dirt and ashes stuck to his skin. He swept his hand out around him, gesturing to the horrible destruction of everything his uncle had worked so hard for. “Why would you do this? How could you kill them?”

“It wasn’t part of the plan to kill any of them,” she answered mournfully, though her face showed none of the compassion their master had instructed them on, “but plans change when obstacles come up. _They_ were my obstacles.”

Ben shook his head, praying to every the Force and god he’d ever heard of that this was just a dream. He wanted to pinch himself and wake up to find all of this, everything he’d witnessed, was nothing more than a nightmare, something to speak to Uncle Luke about. A part of him knew, though, that if he pinched himself, he wouldn’t wake up. He’d just look like a fool when he couldn’t afford to look anything but strong.

“I guess you’ll have to kill me, too,” Ben said as he positioned himself in a fighting stance and held his lightsaber out in front of him, ready to defend himself and whatever was left of the school from her clutches until his last breath.

Vera snorted. “I’m not going to kill you, Ben.” He watched her warily as she crept forward on her long, lithe legs, smiling she had a secret she could never tell another living soul. When she came to stand before him, she cocked an eyebrow at his shaking hands and laughed in a cold way that sent a shock of horror straight through his veins. “I’m going to turn you.”

“Never,” Ben spat vehemently. “I will _never_ turn to the Dark side.”

“Maybe not for a long while,” Vera agreed, seeming the opposite of broken up about it, “but you will, eventually. It is your destiny to turn as much as it is mine, Ben Solo.”

Ben took a step back, nearly tripping when he forgot he was on a staircase, as she took a step forward and held up her hand. He felt a set of icy claws slipping into his mind, raking against his shields until it was nothing short of painful to keep them up. He screamed as his shields collapsed, allowing her entrance into his mind.

“Goodnight, Ben,” was the last thing he heard before he blacked out on the steps of the ruined Jedi Praxeum.


	2. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just so you know, this IS a reimagining, so dialogue and stuff is going to be different. I'm not going to try and make everything the same because there's no fun in that. We've all seen the film. So, the dialogue is different, things are happening differently. I might use some dialogue from the movies in some places, but it's mostly going to be different.

_ 34 ABY _

A billion lifeforms twinkled in the Force. Their signatures dancing around in a dozen dizzying states, all speaking of the mysteries of life in a language long forbidden to common men. Some were no more than a speck of dust in the dark of night while others were brighter than a cluster of thousand stars.

Ben could feel each of them as if they were right next to him, not millions of lightyears away from him, and a small part of him wondered if those vividly brilliant signatures, the ones that threatened to blind him from their radiance, could feel him as well.

One was startlingly close, so close. Its light seemed to enclose around him, burying him in warmth and goodness so sweet it was almost how he imagined being dipped in a vat of warm milk and honey would feel like. Though he knew it was a bad idea, he reached out with his own light, trying to see if he could touch it and make it feel the same way he’d felt.

The coils of his light just barely slid against the other when Ben was slammed out of his meditation by a forceful jerk of the ship that sent him sailing off the edge of his bunk and onto the icy floor. He winced as his head cracked against durasteel, sending a splitting pain shooting from the back of his head to the forefront of his brain. “Blast!” he grumbled.

With a heavy fog descending on his brain, Ben just barely managed to get to his feet and rush over to the trunk he kept at the foot of his bed. A simple wave of his hand sent the lid thumping back against the metal walls with a heavy thunk. His blaster and lightsaber lay on a folded up scrap of material from a cloak he’d torn during a desperate chase. 

An overwhelming need to hold his lightsaber in his hands, to feel it the vibrations from its blade sending waves of shock up his arms, swept over him. He could hear some small part of his soul telling him to take it, urging him to ignite it, but he couldn’t bring himself to wrap his hand around the weapon, not after the destruction he’d seen such blades carry out.

With one last look at the lightsaber, Ben grabbed his blaster and tucked it into the waistband of his simple black pants. 

He took off at a run for the nose of the ship, hoping his father was there navigating an asteroid field and not causing trouble. Having forgotten his boots in his hurry, he slid along the floors almost clumsily as he tried to hurry through the halls in the soft pair of socks Chewbacca had gifted to him for his last birthday with the claim that he’d made them himself.

Ben skidded into the cockpit to witness his father hooping and hollering as he pulled in a ship with a tractor beam. “What in the universe is going on, Dad?” he exclaimed as he came to an abrupt stop behind his father’s dancing figure. “You broke me out of my meditation.”

His father stopped doing some strange jig he’d probably learned at a backwater cantina and turned to look at him with a set of wide eyes and an even wider smile. “We found her, son!”

Ben’s brows creased together as he stepped forward to look out the viewport. His confusion soon gave way to sudden realization when he finally got a good look at the ship his father had locked onto. “The Millennium Falcon,” he said with the knowledge that it could be no other ship. “You found the Falcon, Dad.”

“You bet I did, son.” Han came up to stand behind him and clapped a hand down Ben’s broad shoulder. If Ben didn’t know any better, he would think tears were the cause for the glistening in his father’s eyes, but he knew pride was the more likely thing to blame. “Now, let’s go get her out of the hands of those thieves down there, eh?”

“Alright,” Ben replied in a resigned way. “Just promise me this isn’t going to end with Chewie ripping off someone’s arms. It makes such a mess,” he shuddered as he remembered the last puddle of blood, “and I’m always the one who has to clean it up.”

“C’mon, you know Chewie only tears off the arms of people who beat him in Dejarik and tax collectors,” Han quipped with a snicker as he grabbed his blaster from his seat and stuffed it into his belt.

“Yeah, that’s not true,” Ben reminded him.

Han raised a silver eyebrow and said, “Close enough to the truth, eh?”

Ben rolled his eyes and followed his father down the halls of the ship they’d  _ borrowed  _ from one of his father’s old  _ friends  _ until they made it to the docking bay where the Falcon was connected. “Speaking of Chewie, where is he?” Ben asked as he realized their furry friend hadn’t yet joined them.

“Ah, he’s making himself a sandwich or something in the kitchens,” Han said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “He figured you were enough back-up for this crazy coot.”

“I’m no Wookiee,” Ben grumbled, though he imagined he could do enough damage to keep his sort-of-sane father from obtaining a fatal injury.

“Nope, you’re better than a Wookiee, kid.” Han smiled proudly, giving Ben a look that reminded him of the way he looked at the Falcon. “You’re a Solo.”

Before Ben could say anything, Han slammed his hand down on the control button and stormed into the Falcon with his blaster ready to be fired in his hands. Ben followed, albeit at a much more cautious pace, and kept one hand behind his back, ready to draw his own blaster at a moment’s notice.

They made their way through the familiar, yet unfamiliar halls of the ship, taking note of each new mark on the ship’s interior. Dents had been pounded into the walls with enough force that Ben knew there would be no getting them out. Scratches had been scraped into the floors that no buffer could possibly soothe. Someone had been rough with his father’s pride and joy over the years since they’d lost her.

“There’s going to be hell to pay for that,” he grumbled to himself as he traced a gloved finger over an engraving of a heart scratched into one of the nearby walls.

Ben almost started in the direction of the cockpit when he heard the smallest sound of scuffling from below him. He blinked as he realized why they hadn’t yet seen the ship’s infamous thieves yet. His father was farther ahead than him, probably already compiling a list of the damage done to his precious baby, and he didn’t want to alert the thieves to his presence by yelling for the old man. With a long-suffering sigh, he grabbed his blaster from his back and bent over to pull up the hidden compartment his father had used dozens of times to smuggle illegal goods from planet-to-planet.

The compartment’s open lid revealed a girl, a boy, and a droid.

“Well, that’s unexpected,” Ben remarked as he took a step back for the stowaways to scramble out of the small space. They didn’t look like criminal masterminds, nor did they look like regular criminals either. “I’m going to give you a chance to explain what you’re doing on this ship before I turn off the safety on my blaster.”

The girl’s wide eyes darted over to the boys for a split-second as the boy’s did the same to her. Both eyes immediately fell down to the droid between them as its rounded head rotated up to look at them. Ben watched their interaction with keen eyes, trying to gather what he could about the three troublemakers before they had the opportunity to lie to him.

It was the girl that stepped forward first.

Ben’s eyes stayed focused on her as she stepped away from her friends and held out her hands in a supplicating gesture as if to tell him that she meant no harm. His eyes fell to her hands as she did so, noticing the small, white scars that flecked them and the rough calluses on her suntanned palms. One of those hands reached up to tuck a stray hair, one of many, back behind her ear and he followed that hand up to her face where he noticed the bright hazel of her eyes and the freckles that traced a pattern across her cheeks.

“We don’t want to cause any trouble,” the girl said in a strange accent that sounded much too proper and high class for someone wearing sand-stained rags. “All we want to do is return this droid to its rightful place.”

“I don’t care about what you’re wanting to do,” Ben replied, probably a little too harshly, as he cast a quick glance at the droid, a small voice in the back of his mind telling him that it looked strangely familiar. “I want to know what you’re doing on this ship.”

The girl’s brown brows ticked together as she tried to puzzle over his words. “Why do you care what we’re doing on this rust-bucket? It’s garbage.”

Taken aback, Ben wondered if the girl even knew that she was on the Millennium Falcon. Sure, the ship was famous galaxy-wide because of his father’s efforts in the war, but word-of-mouth left out and twisted a lot of details about what the ship actually looked like. “Do you know what ship your on?”

“No,” the girl answered slowly, casting a wide-eyed glance around at their dilapidated surroundings, obviously surprised by the turn their conversation had taken. “Do you?”

Ben opened his mouth to answer when he was beat the chase by his father. “You’re on the Millennium Falcon, kid.” He watched as his father stepped out from the nearest hall and studied the stragglers with a strange light in his eyes. “She’s the fastest ship in the Galaxy.”

The girl’s mouth dropped open, but it quickly shut itself as she started shaking her head. “No, no, no.” She spread her arms wide and gestured around the area with a look of disbelief. “This cannot be the ship that made the Kessel Run in fourteen parsecs.”

The boy finally spoke up, almost looking out-of-place as he added, “I didn’t even think it would get us off Jakku.”

“Jakku?” Ben repeated in surprise. What was the ship doing on Jakku? “What was it doing on Jakku? Where on Jakku?”

“It was twelve parsecs,” his father snapped in defense of the Falcon’s honor, cutting off Ben's questions, “and I think I would know what the Falcon looks like. She’s my ship, after all.”

“She can’t be your ship because that would make you—,” the girl stopped suddenly, her words trailing off slowly as a strange light gathered in her eyes. She looked at his father with something like admiration in her starry eyes as she said, “Han Solo,” in a quiet, awed tone.

“At your service,” his father grumbled.

“Han Solo, the rebellion general?” the boy asked, amazement creeping into his voice.

“No, the smuggler,” the girl snapped back in a clearly affronted tone.

Ben raised an eyebrow at their wishy-washy reverence to a man he’d seen down three shots of Corellian whiskey and belch louder than a Anoatian pit beast’s roar. He knew, of course, that his father was a hero to the Galaxy, same as his mother and uncle, but it always surprised him to actually see someone in complete wonder of the man he simply knew as his dad.

“What are you doing on my ship?” Han repeated Ben’s question, obviously annoyed with their wide eyes and idolization. He’d never been one for the attention of the masses. “Also, if you’re the ones who put the scratches all up and down her, you can kiss your arms goodbye.”

The boy’s eyes widened in fear, but the girl simply looked determined as she patted the droids head and said, “We’re trying to return this droid to the Resistance.”

Ben’s heart sunk to the pit in his stomach at the mention of the Resistance. Another look at the droid confirmed his suspicions that he knew it from somewhere. He suddenly knew why it looked so familiar to him. The little BB-unit was Poe kriffing Dameron’s beloved droid. Of course, of course, it had to be Dameron’s droid.

“I’d rather throw it out the airlock,” Ben said as he crossed his arms over his chest and leaned his shoulder against the nearest wall.

The little droid chirped in fright at the thought of being sent into the cold vastness of space. The girl turned a nasty glare on him as she stepped in front of the droid. “His name is BB8,” she said with determination, looking his father square in the eye as she did so, “and he has important information for the Resistance.”

“What kind of information?” Ben asked, his curiosity getting the better of him.

The girl’s bravado slipped and she seemed almost unsure of herself. She turned to look at the boy and raised an eyebrow at him. He ran a hand over his crop of hair, again, and stepped forward, obviously gaining confidence in the presence of a pretty pair of eyes. “The droid has a map to Luke Skywalker.”

Ben blinked.

He couldn’t have actually said what he’d heard. 

There was no possible way.

Luke was gone. His spirit hadn’t passed on to the Force yet, but he was gone nonetheless. The attack on the praxeum had broken him in ways that Ben couldn’t even imagine. He’d been a shell of the man he once was, no longer the Jedi that felt no true sorrow. When he’d said he was going away to meditate on the tragedy, Ben had known his master wasn’t planning on coming back.

“Impossible,” Ben scoffed, mainly out of fear that it was true.

“No, I swear it’s true,” the boy responded almost immediately. “My friend died trying to get this information back to the Resistance.”

Ben’s eyes followed the way the droid’s head seemed to sink in despair and it whined quietly for a small moment, sounding all too much like a kicked loth-cat. “Poe Dameron’s dead,” he assessed out loud, wondering if his assumption was correct.

The boy nodded solemnly.

Ben turned his gaze to his dad and frowned immediately at the look the old man was giving him. There was a twinkle in his eyes and a rogue-ish curve to his lips. By the Force, he would know that look anywhere. It was the kriffing stupid look his father got when he was about to do something heroic. “No, Dad, let’s just put them in a shuttle and send them to the closest occupied planet and get the hell out of here.”

“It’s Luke, Ben,” his dad protested as he started to make his way to the cockpit with the rest of them following closely behind. “We have to help the Resistance find him, for the good of the Galaxy.”

“Oh, so it’s not just so you can have an excuse to see Mom, huh?” Ben countered as he grabbed his dad’s shoulder and forced him to a stop. “I mean, when was the last time you saw her? Chandrila? Coruscant?”

“I’m not trying to see your mother, Ben.” Han plopped himself down into the pilot’s seat and started flipping control switches left-and-right. “I just want to do the right thing for the Galaxy. Besides, that ship sailed a long, long time ago.”

Ben opened his mouth to say something else when his father froze and started yelling about some compressor. The girl came up with bright eyes and said she’d noticed the same thing, mentioning that Unkar Plutt did it. His father’s eyes lit up at the girl’s excitement, almost as if he was looking at a mini-him and he approved. He shot Ben a ‘I like her’ look, but Ben didn’t put too much stock in the look. His father had done the same thing when they’d watch a Togruta female chug back a quart of whiskey without so much as catching her breath just a couple weeks back.

“Since when do you care about the good of the Galaxy?” Ben asked with his arms crossed over his chest.

“You’re forgetting who helped blow up the Deathstar, twice!” The kids looked excited by his proclamation, but Ben simply rolled his eyes. He’d heard the Deathstar excuse close to a thousand times, and it had gotten old a long time ago. “Now, how about you get Chewie and tell him to get his furry ass over here before we take off?”

It wasn’t a question. It was a command.

“Aye, aye, Captain,” Ben responded dryly. “What about our, ahem,  _ cargo _ ?”

Cargo wasn’t exactly the word he would have chosen for the slimy, tentacled creatures taking up residence in their freighter, but it would have to do in front of the kids. He didn’t want to excite them by using the word  _ Rathtar.  _ A small part of himself remembered when he’d been bright-eyed and excited by the different creatures of the Galaxy. A lot had changed since then.

“We’ll just abandon the freighter and leave them to space,” Han said off-handedly, clearly having not spent a single second thinking about their previous occupation the moment he’d stepped onto the Falcon. “Someone will find them, eventually.”

With a deep, calming breath, Ben left the cockpit and made his way back to the freighter. He didn’t have to go far, however, to find Chewie. As soon as he stepped out of the Falcon, his eyes caught onto a shag of dark brown fur. His quasi-uncle was sitting on a durasteel crate with a thick sandwich in one big paw.

“Dad says to forget the cargo and get on the ship before he takes off without you,” Ben said dispassionately. “When you get on there, tell him I’ll be there in a second. I’m just grabbing some stuff from my bunk.”

Taking his time, Ben made his way through the halls of the ship he’d come to know as home. He’d always known it would be temporary, of course, but that didn’t mean that he hadn’t grown to care for it. Memories lurked around every corner, inside every bunk. This had been his home ever since the destruction of the academy—his father had lost the Falcon long before then—and he had to admit he would miss it.

When he made it to his bunk, he grabbed a knapsack and loaded it high with his junk. He didn’t have much, but he’d begun to collect stuff, mainly books, from the different planets he visited. They were rare, but he had dozens of copies of paper books, not holos, and he kept them in pristine condition. He put on his boots, finally, and grabbed a cloak. A couple shirts, pants, and socks.

A couple minutes passed and he was almost ready when he remembered one thing: his lightsaber. He lifted the lid to the trunk at the end of his bed and stared down at the weapon. He could take it, easily, but what would be the point? He hadn’t used it in years, and he wasn’t even sure he wanted to use it. After everything that happened at the academy, he couldn’t imagine himself touching one of them again, not when he could still smell burning flesh whenever he thought of that night.

He left it.

And he only looked back at it once.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let me know what you think. I want opinions, predictions, just plain comments. I'll take anything. Thanks for reading!


End file.
